


Quantum Theory of Magic

by Sholio



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Gen, Reference To Canon Deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29238582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: As they rebuild the new Asgard settlement on Earth, something is wrong with Loki. Thor just has to figure out what.
Relationships: Loki & Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 110
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Quantum Theory of Magic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MoonGoddex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonGoddex/gifts).



The new home of their people was an appealing place. It was cool and rugged, far from the cities of this world, with a ruffled gray ocean filled with fish for the harvesting and interesting creatures to fight and to hunt.

The _Statesman_ rested in the hills above the town. Some of the more nervous among Asgard's survivors chose to remain there. But most of them were down on the shore, throwing themselves in the work of building new homes for themselves, some fashioned after the fisherman's houses of this place, others attempting to replicate the homes they had left behind on their vanished world.

And Thor was worried about Loki.

Ordinarily, his curious brother would have been the first off the ship, eager to investigate this place and, probably, ready to insult it in six different languages as a primitive backwater unworthy of his presence before going up in the hills to learn the ways and the shapes of the animals here.

Instead Loki had stayed in his quarters, buried in his books and surrounded by his illusions, as if they were still in the depths of space and not anchored solidly on the soil of Midgard.

"You'll do him no favors by hovering," Brunnhilde told him shortly, passing him with a massive bundle of nets over her shoulder.

"I have no idea what you mean," Thor said. He tore his eyes away from the curve of the ship's hull, just visible between two mountain peaks, and went back to his current task: clearing a road to one of the new building sites up the hill. He casually lifted a boulder and placed it to one side, having been informed by some of the locals down the coast that these rocks could be home to elves and not wanting to disturb one.

"Sure you don't." Rather than going on down to the bay, Brunnhilde plunked herself down on the boulder, and Thor turned to frown at her, wiping mud off his face with the back of his hand. It was spring in this land, damp and chill, with frequent storms driving rain inland from the sea.

"Don't you have somewhere to be?" he asked with a pointed look at the nets.

"I'm helping the fishermen today. I can catch up." She smiled and sat with her legs spread on the boulder, fists resting between her thighs. "I hear there are giant kraken in the deeps. Or so the neighbors say."

"Save some for me," Thor said. He moved another boulder. At this rate it was going to take all day to get up to the top of the hill and flatten a building site, but his heart wasn't in it.

Something stung his shoulder. He looked around, startled, to see that she had lobbed a fist-sized rock at him.

"Stop moping and go talk to your brother."

"I thought you told me not to hover."

"I _meant_ stop lurking around giving him worried looks, and just go ask him what's wrong."

"I am not lurk—"

"He hasn't been right for months. You know it. I know it. Stop dancing around it. I'd talk to him myself, but he would never talk to _me_ ," she said matter-of-factly. "He trusts you, Thor, as he trusts no one else."

He looked at her critically. The sea air and planetary gravity agreed with her. She had been drinking less, and looked bright-eyed, fresh of skin, hale and hearty. She had been taking on more of the daily administration routine of the Asgardian settlement, seeming to enjoy it.

"Stop staring at me and go ask the lackey what's bothering him before both of you give yourselves an ulcer." Brunnhilde picked up her massive lump of netting as if it weighed nothing. No Midgardian could even have lifted it. "I'm off to catch a kraken."

"I expect a feast tonight!" Thor called after her. She raised a fist in response.

He tossed another boulder aside and went up the hill to talk to Loki.

*

The ship that had been their home for so long was now a dark, cavernous space. Light streamed from the handful of cabins that were still occupied, but it was fewer every day as the settlement became more comfortable, and more of the ship's holdouts were enticed down to join their families and friends.

Thor's feet knew the route to Loki's cabin so well that he could have walked it dead drunk and blindfolded—which was just as well, since the corridor was almost entirely pitch black; for power-saving reasons, there were only a handful of lights in parts of the ship not being actively used. He knocked on Loki's door.

There was no response.

"Loki, it's Thor."

No reply. It was possible that Loki was asleep. With the ship largely powered down and most of its former residents elsewhere, Loki had become untethered from a regular day-night cycle, as Thor remembered also being the case during some of Loki's intense study periods when they were much younger.

"Loki," he said, and knocked again. Then he gave in to temptation: the old habits of childhood. "Loki. Loki. LokiLokiLokiLokiLokiLoki—"

The door whisked open and Loki stood there, glaring at him. "What?" he snapped.

Loki looked perfectly well, except perhaps for a bit of shadow around his eyes: his clothes were impeccable, his hair well-groomed. And that, Thor supposed, was a warning sign from someone who traded in appearances. He wasn't sure which was the more dangerous signal, that some of Loki's exhaustion showed on his face, or that he was as neat and well turned out as if he was attending a banquet when he'd been in the ship without seeing anyone for weeks.

"Do you have a minute?" Thor said.

Loki shut the door in his face.

And then opened it a moment later. "You're still here," he said.

"I do want to talk to you," Thor said mildly.

"As I'd rather not replace the door ... fine," Loki said.

He turned away with a huff, and Thor followed him inside. Loki's quarters were neither especially large nor small; it was an ordinary stateroom on the upper level of the ship, a few doors down from the one Thor used to occupy.

And it was crammed with books. There were bookshelves massed solidly on the walls, books piled on the floor, books on the bed. Since there was nowhere to sleep, presumably Loki must nap on a pile of books. It was no wonder he looked tired.

Thor had never asked where the books had come from. Loki certainly hadn't had them when they had fled Asgard.

Sometimes when he'd come in here, the walls had been made of illusion, showing sweeping vistas of green grass and far hills. Butterflies had fluttered about; snowflakes had fallen. Now it was simply dark, with just a single light over the reading desk that was also, of course, piled with books.

"Reading a lot lately," Thor said, the end rising into a hesitant question.

Loki sighed deeply. "Just talk," he said, and sat down on the one chair in the room.

Thor sat on a pile of books. Loki gave him a look. Thor ignored it.

"What's wrong?" he said simply.

Loki made a single sound, an exhalation: not one of his sighs of exasperation, which Thor was well familiar with at his own expense, but a sound like a short gasp of something akin to pain.

"Nothing," he said, too quickly. "I'm fine."

"I've heard that before," Thor said.

"Have you."

"Do you remember when we were boys—"

"Oh, _Norns—"_

"And some of the servants' children were bullying you," Thor went on. Loki went quiet. "Pursuing you after lessons. Stealing your books, knocking you down. They would have been severely punished had anyone known, of course. You were the child of the king! But you were young, and small, and they knew all the tricks that children know for being cruel to other children without adults finding out. I asked you about it, why you had those bruises, why your new coat was torn. And you said you were fine, of course."

Loki didn't say anything. 

"They stopped bothering you after a while," Thor said.

Loki's gaze darted up to meet Thor's, briefly, his eyes dark and shadowed. "Of _course_ you had something to do with that."

"I merely made it clear to them that attacking you was the same as attacking us both."

"So you thought me incapable of solving my own problems."

"No," Thor said, genuinely shocked and a little hurt. "No, I just—"

"Thought you knew what was best for me," Loki said. "As always."

"I didn't like to see you _hurt!"_ Thor snapped.

Loki went silent. His eyes, in the dim light, were like a bruise.

"It hurt me too, don't you understand that? I don't know what's hurting you now, Loki. But I'd like to help, if I can."

Loki stared at him for a moment, then swung around on the chair and dropped his hand onto one of the various books that lay open on the desk in front of him. He rested it there for a moment, head down. Then he picked up a pen that rested on the desk and scribbled a couple of quick notes in the notebook beside it.

"Before it gets out of my head," he explained, and ran a hand through his hair. "You _know_ I'm working in here. I don't bother you when you're working."

"I've never minded," Thor said.

"You complained quite loudly when I startled you while you were stalking that bilgesnipe up behind the Smoking Reaches," Loki said without turning around.

"Yes, that's because I had been creeping up on it for two days and was nearly impaled."

Loki laughed quietly to himself and laid down his pen.

"In other worlds," he said, "I died."

Thor wasn't quite sure how to respond to that.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

Loki swung around on the chair and rested his chin on his fist.

"Did you pay any attention at all to Mother's magic theory lessons?"

"Er," Thor said.

"Yes. That's what I thought." Loki moved his free hand in the air; glittering green light trailed behind it. "Magic is about seeing possibilities, brother. Seeing what could be instead of what is. And if you do it long enough, peer deeply enough, you begin to see the _maybe_ , the what-might-be beneath the what-is."

"I don't understand," Thor said honestly. 

Loki looked exasperated, but in his newfound search for kingly perception and wisdom, Thor had endeavored not to pretend comprehension of things he knew not. If he had a question, he asked it. If he did not understand the answer, he said so. He would once have considered this a sign of weakness, but he had come to realize that asking questions rather than pretending to know the answers led to greater knowledge and even greater respect, not less.

Except, of course, from Loki, who was now giving him a look familiar from their childhood.

"Okay. So. Dumbing it down." Loki sat up straighter. "I expect you didn't listen to our tutors about quantum theory either, so I'll dumb it down still further. All of us exist at all times in a cloud of potential futures. Every time that we make something happen, one of those futures becomes real for us. With me so far?"

"I did pay _some_ attention, you know," Thor said, mildly nettled.

"Mm-hmm. But all those other potential futures are still out there. Somewhere, in some universe, a different Thor _did_ end up gored by the bilgesnipe you dodged."

"Sounds painful," Thor said.

"It probably would have been. Now. Doing magic means choosing a future with considerably more deliberation and awareness than the usual flailing through n-dimensional space that we all ... well, that most of us do. A magician can choose from the vanishingly unlikely futures, the ones in which an object levitates or turns into something else. But in order to choose that future, one must examine them all and select the desired one, not just unthinkingly reach out into the world with muscle and sinew."

"I know I'm being insulted, but you've crafted much more cutting insults in the past."

"I wasn't _trying,"_ Loki said, and this time it was his turn to sound irritated. "Here's the thing, Thor. When you get in the habit of seeing those alternate futures, sometimes you just _keep_ seeing them. Your world becomes crowded with them."

Thor glanced around. The dim room full of books took on new, ominous dimensions. "Do you see that all the time?"

"Of course," Loki said offhandedly. "I'm used to it. But here's the thing. Recently my potential futures began to narrow. And it was on our flight here that they ..."

He stopped. The expression on his face was tight.

"They what?" Thor asked gently.

"Exploded," Loki said. He was looking not at Thor, but off in the general direction of the wall, or maybe at something only he could see there. "I _died,_ Thor. I died brutally and I died many times, in a hundred universes, a thousand, a million." He sucked in a shuddering breath. "So did you, often. I saw a thousand futures where I could have saved you but did not. And a thousand more in which the reward for my saving you was my own death. And they are _with_ me—a hundred, a thousand, a million worlds I cannot escape."

Thor was on his feet, not remembering how he came to stand, although he wasn't even sure what it was that he wanted to fight, only that he wanted to fight something.

"What killed you?" he asked, his voice shaking. "Different things? Or—"

"Something that's not here," Loki said. There was a tightness to it, a sense of tightly drawn self-control. "Obviously. It's not a threat to me _now._ Or ... at all, in this universe. At least I don't think so. And there are other universes like that, but—not very many of them. I've gone from being surrounded by a cloud of my own potentiality to a cloud of snuffed-out futures, and let me tell you, it's—"

Thor was already standing, so it was the matter of a few steps to move close enough to wrap his arms around Loki and pick him up out of the chair.

"Erk," Loki said faintly and breathlessly.

"But you're here now," Thor said. It was all he could think of to say. He hadn't, he thought, hugged Loki enough; that was probably part of the problem between them. He would have to do something about that in the future.

Loki hesitantly hugged him back, in a rusty kind of way that suggested a lack of practice. "Could you—put me down?"

"In a minute," Thor said.

"Because I can't—breathe—"

Thor set him on his feet. Loki took a deep breath and a not-so-subtle step away, but he stumbled over a stack of books and Thor caught and held him, his hand gripped around Loki's forearm.

"See, this is why I don't tell you things like this," Loki said, but there was no venom in it.

"The Valkyrie is bringing back a great beast from the deeps of the ocean. There will be a feast."

"Hooray," Loki said, but his fingers were knotted around Thor's muscular forearm as tightly as Thor gripped his, as if Thor was somehow grounding him. "Roasted ocean beast. My favorite."

"There will be other things than roasted ocean beast."

"I should hope so."

"Those futures," Thor said, and felt Loki tense. "Away from the ship, you'd have less of that ... wouldn't you? If it happened here? And—"

He couldn't quite say the next part, but Loki said musingly, "And not many of me made it to the new Asgard settlement. Fresh possibilities, entire realms of them. Indeed."

"So why do you stay cooped up here? Out there—"

"Yes, world of possibility, _whatever,"_ Loki snapped. "You just want me to look at your new world. You were always like that whenever you had a new toy."

"There are many interesting creatures in the hills," Thor said, because he was not without awareness of what motivated Loki. "Many new plants as well. Perhaps some even unknown to the inhabitants of this world, because we are quite remote and their biodiversity—"

"I hate it when you use words like biodiversity. It makes it so hard to insult you." Loki reached behind him and closed the book. "What does roasted ocean beast taste like?"

"I understand it's rubbery."

"Rubbery. My favorite adjective pertaining to food."

But he came.


End file.
